ABSTRACT
Re-photography or repeat photography is a photographic practice that helps photographer examine change over time. The basic steps of the method include finding a photograph made in the past, locating the place the original photograph was made, making a new repeat photograph and comparing that photograph to the original photograph. The making of the re-photographs can be treated as means to a much more complex end: an in-depth multifaceted investigation of a site, with the historic photographs and the resulting re-photographs creating a starting point, not an ending point or resolution. Mark Klett’s Rephototographic Survey Project (RSP) team engaged in extensive field expeditions to locate and re-photograph significant landscape scenes made by the survey photographers of the American West. The RSP team utilized not only the original photographs themselves, but also maps, writings and other documents collected from the archives of the original surveys.
